New Benchmark for Data by - DCIG

New   Benchmark    for   Data
Protection     Created     by
StorageCraft Arcserve Merger
Two companies merging in the technology sector occurs with
some regularity. However, a merger that makes sense for both
providers with everyone coming out a winner occurs less
frequently. Today’s announced merger between StorageCraft
Technology Corporation and Arcserve illustrates this rarer
occurrence. Each company’s technologies address different
organizational needs that, once merged, will create a new
benchmark for data protection.

Same but Different
Storagecraft and Arcserve both provide backup software for
organizations so, in that sense, they are the same. However,
their respective solutions differ in many ways. These
differences begin with the size of the organizations their
respective software protects.

                                 Arcserve UDP: Scope of Data
                                 Protection Capabilities

Arcserve’s customers primarily consist of small and midsize
enterprises (SMEs) with the majority residing outside the
United States (US). Conversely, StorageCraft’s customers
largely consist of US-based managed service providers (MSPs)
that service small and midsize businesses (SMBs).

The differences in the organizations to which they cater stems
from the strengths of their respective backup solutions.
Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) addresses needs common

to SMEs to include backing up multiple types of applications,
databases, hypervisors, and operating systems. It may also
store data on both cloud and local storage and delivers UDP on
both physical and virtual appliances. This graphic illustrates
the scope of UDP’s backup capabilities.

StorageCraft tailors its OneXafe and ShadowXafe solutions to
meet the specific needs of SMBs. Its OneXafe solution provides
a converged backup and storage solution for on-premises
backup. Its ShadowXafe provides a software solution for SMBs.
Its newer offering, OneXafe Solo, equips MSPs or organizations
with multiple remote sites to centralize backup. StorageCraft
also provides MSPs and organizations with its OneSystem cloud-
based console for centralized backup management.

 Source: StorageCraft

The Impetus for the Merger
The “same but different” backup solutions available from
StorageCraft and Arcserve help explain the impetus behind this
merger. By merging, they creates a new company more fully
equipped to address a wider range of organizational backup and
recovery needs. These include:

Meeting backup needs from the smallest office to
the enterprise
The COVID-19 pandemic that forced more individuals to work
remotely changed backup requirements, likely forever. These
changes often forced organizations to use multiple different
solutions to meet these different backup requirements.
StorageCraft and Arcserve changes this. Combined, they provide
a one-stop shop for backup and recovery ranging from the
smallest office to the enterprise.

More powerful ransomware deterrent
Ransomware continues to negatively impact all companies
regardless of size. While both StorageCraft’s and
Arcserve’s solutions already offer anti-ransomware
technologies, each one uses different techniques. Together,
they create a more comprehensive and powerful means to detect
and defeat the spread of ransomware.

Comprehensive disaster           recovery-as-a-service
(DRaaS) offerings
Each provider already had a DRaaS offering with its own
purpose-built cloud for DR. By coming together,
organizations of all sizes have access to a more comprehensive
purpose-built DR solution. Their combined solutions will also
offer more points of presence across the US.

Meets the emerging need for cloud-based and SaaS-
based backup
Almost all organizations already host applications and data
in the AWS, Azure, or Google clouds. Alternatively, they
may use SaaS applications such as Microsoft Office 365. Once
merged, these new single company will offer the means to
protect applications and data hosted in any of these clouds.

Perhaps most notable about this merger, it brings together two
award-winning backup solutions under one roof. Arcserve UDP
was recognized as a TOP 5 solution in the DCIG 2020-21 SME AWS
Cloud Backup and SME Anti-ransomware Backup reports.

Similarly, StorageCraft was recognized as a TOP 5 solution in
the DCIG All-in-one DRaaS, Office 365 Online SaaS Backup, and
SME Anti-ransomware Backup reports.

Now organizations will no longer have to choose between these
two solutions. They will have access to the best technologies
available to protect their applications and data regardless of

where they host them.

Storagecraft   and  Arcserve:                      A     New
Benchmark for Data Protection
Events of the last year have turned many established
organizational practices on their head. Data protection has
not been immune from this upheaval. Organizations now, more
than ever, need a backup solution that addresses everything.
It needs to span from the enterprise to the remote office to
the cloud.

The merger of StorageCraft and Arcserve bring together two
award-winning, best-of-breed solutions under one roof. In so
doing, it provides almost any size organization a solution to
which they may turn to address almost any of their respective
needs. Further, the solutions which this single company will
offer represent some of the best that the market currently has
to offer. In so doing, this new company and its suite of
solutions will create a new benchmark for data protection by
which all others should be measured.

Editor’s Note: Arcserve and StorageCraft are both clients of
DCIG.

2021-22 DCIG TOP 3 GCP Cloud
Backup Solutions Report Now
Available
DCIG is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the
2021-22 DCIG TOP 3 GCP Cloud Backup Solutions report. This
report provides guidance on TOP 3 backup solutions

organizations should consider for backing up applications and
data they host on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

GCP Tops in YoY Cloud Revenue Percentage
Growth
In 2008 Google introduced its Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to
the world. Now it stands among the leaders in cloud providers
worldwide. Compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft
Azure, GCP experienced the most growth year-over-year (YoY) in
Q4 2020 on a percentage basis.

This growth indicates more organizations first look to GCP or
consider it as an option to AWS or Azure. While AWS and Azure
lead GCP in annual cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS)
revenue, GCP offers features and services they do not. Key
features and services that help differentiate GCP from them
include:

     Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) holds the top spot
     as the most widely used cloud software-as-a-service
     (SaaS) office productivity suite. In early 2020, it had
     more than two billion monthly active users.
     GCP supports creating custom virtual machine (VM)
     instances. While all cloud IaaS providers offer
     predefined VMs, only GCP currently makes custom VMs
     available. Organizations may create a VM with a specific
     number of vCPUs and a specified amount of memory.
     GCP’s Cloud Healthcare APIs positions organizations to
     comply with healthcare data standards like HL7®FHIR®,
     HL7® v2 and DICOM. Using its Cloud Healthcare APIs, they
     can better meet specific clinical and data standards and
     comply with HIPAA.
     GCP’s Premium Tier network option offers over 100 points

of presence globally, more than any public IaaS
     provider. The GCP Premium Network Tier includes Global
     Load Balancing that facilitates seamless expansion,
     overflow, or failover between GCP regions.

GCP’s Bright Future
Since 93 percent of enterprises already have a multi-cloud
strategy, this foretells a bright future for GCP’s continued
growth.   GCP provides the core IaaS services that many
enterprises initially seek to create a viable multi-cloud
strategy. These core services include analytics, compute,
database, identity management, networking, storage, and
virtual desktops.

GCP also offers advanced services such as artificial
intelligence, containers, DevOps, Kubernetes, machine
learning, and serverless compute, among many others. These
services serve as a foundation for its hybrid vision of
helping organizations create and maintain hybrid clouds. This
vision supports organizations moving from VMs to containers
and ultimately to Kubernetes pods.

As of February 2021, GCP has 25 regions throughout the world
with nine more in development. Each of these 25 regions
contains at least three zones with one containing four zones.
Taken together, these benefits make a compelling argument for
enterprises to adopt, embrace, and expand their use of GCP.

Backup Still a Requirement in the GCP
Cloud
GCP offers many features organizations want from a public
cloud platform to include high availability, redundancy,
security, and much more. Despite these benefits, organizations
must remember that as they host applications and data in GCP
they retain responsibility for them.

This puts the onus on organizations to back up and recover
their applications and data. Should they become corrupted,
deleted, lost, or compromised, GCP does not automatically back
up or recover them.

As a result of its acquisition of Actifio in December 2020,
Google now offers its own backup solution. However,
organizations must subscribe and pay for Actifio to back up
their applications and data in the GCP cloud. Further,
organizations may have application and data backup and
recovery requirements that Actifio may not meet. This will
necessitate they identify a third-party solution for their GCP
backup and recovery needs.

The State of GCP Cloud Backup Solutions
Despite GCP’s growing prominence as an IaaS provider, DCIG
only identified eight backup solutions from which
organizations may choose. All eight solutions got started
doing physical or virtual machine backup outside of GCP. This
start gave them the core functionality organizations still
need as they move existing applications and data to GCP.

Organizations may deploy six of these backup solutions in the
GCP cloud the same way they do on-premises, with minor
differences. They obtain an appropriately sized VM instance in
GCP to host the backup software. Once obtained, they license,
install, and maintain the backup solution themselves. Finally,
they configure it to back up their applications and data
hosted on GCP. In many respects, they manage this backup
software in the cloud the same way they do now.

Cloud backup solutions delivered this way do, however, face
challenges going forward. Fewer organizations want to manage
backup software the same way they did in the past. Instead,
they want to subscribe and pay for backup software like they
do other services in GCP.

They also want backup software architected and available as a
cloud-native service. Delivered this way, the backup software
automatically scales up or down based on demand. The provider
also handles all the backup software’s ongoing maintenance,
such as fixes, patches, and upgrades. This frees organizations
to focus on using the backup software while removing the task
of maintaining it.

GCP Cloud Backup Solutions
In preparing this TOP 3 report, DCIG evaluated eight cloud
backup solutions that back up applications and data in GCP.
The general categories under which these features fell
included:

     Backup administration
     Backup capabilities
     Configuration, licensing, and pricing
     Recovery and restores
     Snapshot administration
     Support

Based on these criteria, DCIG awarded the following GCP cloud
backup solutions a TOP 3 ranking (in alphabetical order):

     Cobalt Iron Compass
     Commvault Complete™ Backup and Recovery
     HYCU DPaaS for GCP

Report Availability
The full DCIG TOP 3 report is available at no charge with
registration via the link below. The full report contains
additional details such as:

     A listing of all eight solutions evaluated
     Features available in all GCP cloud backup solutions
     A deeper explanation on the key similarities and
     differences between the TOP 3 solutions

A profile of each solution that highlights the ways each
     one distinguishes itself from the other solutions

It is available for download by following this link to a
trusted partner’s site:

     2021-22 DCIG TOP 3 GCP Cloud Backup Solutions Report
     Download – Cobalt Iron

Confidentiality and Copyright
Other than excerpts from this report published in this
announcement, the contents of the 2021-22 DCIG TOP 3 GCP Cloud
Backup Solutions report are copyrighted and may not be
republished without permission.

DCIG will release more TOP 3 and TOP 5 reports in the weeks
and months to come. Please sign up for the weekly DCIG
Newsletter to receive notice of their availability.

Parties interested in licensing DCIG blog articles as
executive white papers, please contact DCIG for more
information.

2021-22 DCIG TOP 5 Rising
Vendors SDS Block Storage
Solutions    Report   Now
Available
DCIG is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the
2021-22 DCIG TOP 5 Rising Vendors SDS Block Storage Solutions
report. This report provides guidance on TOP 5 software-

defined storage (SDS) providers organizations should consider
for SDS block storage solutions.

Background:          SDS    –     Factors          Driving
Adoption
The growth of Software-defined Storage (SDS) is part of a
broader transition to the software-defined data center, where
infrastructure elements such as compute, storage, and
networking are abstracted and virtualized. Increasing SDS
capabilities, along with the demand for flexibility and
agility, fuels SDS demand. Trending at a compound growth rate
                                                             1
of 27%, the SDS market expects to grow $42.79 billion by 2024.

Factors contributing to the growth of SDS include:

     Agility and optionality. Organizations can deploy and
     configure software-defined storage solutions where and
     how they want using their preferred server provider,
     which may differ from their preferred storage software
     vendor. Expanded deployment options open up within
     virtual and cloud platforms as SDS solutions free them
     from particular hardware vendors and infrastructures.
     Increasingly powerful hardware. Advances in underlying
     system hardware, including multicore CPUs, large amounts
     of RAM, flash memory, and fast networking, contribute to
     SDS growth. In many cases, these advances eliminate the
     need for specialized storage hardware, enabling ever-
     expanding storage capacity and consistent, low-latency
     performance.
     Hybrid cloud environments. Cloud adoption and in
     particular, the embrace of hybrid cloud models
     stimulates expansion of SDS. Storage vendors now offer
     their solutions as software on servers of the
     customer’s choice and on public cloud platforms. They

provide enterprise-class data services with performance
     characteristics businesses need for confidence to move
     their workloads to these platforms.

SDS for Block Storage
The traditional storage area network (SAN) appliance has long
been the trusted, shared platform for an enterprise’s most
valuable data. As SDS has moved mainstream, many enterprise
storage vendors have made their solutions available as
software-defined storage on-premises and in the cloud.
Enterprises are comfortable extending trust to these SDS
solutions for mission-critical workloads. In many cases, SDS
solutions for hybrid cloud environments become a natural
extension of the on-premise SAN. With these solutions, the
tools and scripts to deploy and manage cloud data are the same
as on-premise data management.

Rising   Vendors               SDS    Block       Storage
Solutions

In preparing this report, DCIG evaluated fourteen SDS
solutions supporting block storage protocols. The general
categories under which these features fell included:

     Deployment capabilities
     Data protection
     Product and performance management
     Documentation
     Technical support
     Licensing and pricing

Based on these criteria, DCIG awarded the following rising
vendors SDS block storage solutions a TOP 5 ranking (in
alphabetical order):

DataCore SANsymphony
     iXsystems TrueNAS
     Starwind Virtual SAN
     StorONE S1 Enterprise Storage Platform
     Zadara VPSA

Report Availability
The full DCIG TOP 5 report is available at no charge via the
link below. The full report contains additional details such
as:

     A listing of all fourteen solutions evaluated
     An overview of how hybrid cloud adoption is shaping SDS
     product capabilities
     Features shared by all TOP 5 solutions
     A deeper explanation on the key similarities and
     differences between the TOP 5 solutions
     A profile of each solution that highlights the ways each
     distinguishes itself from the other solutions

Confidentiality and Copyright
Other than excerpts from this report published in this
announcement, the contents of the 2021-22 DCIG TOP 5 Rising
Vendors SDS Block Storage Solutions report are copyrighted and
may not be republished without permission.

DCIG invites interested parties to a webinar based on this
report and hosted by StorONE titled ‘What’s Wrong with

Software-Defined Storage?’ on Wednesday, February 17th at 12
p.m. Central Time. DCIG and StorONE will discuss the state
of the SDS market, how to decide if SDS is right for your
organization, and what you should look for in an SDS solution.
Webinar attendees will have first access to the full 2021-22
DCIG TOP 5 Rising Vendors SDS Block Storage Solutions report,
which StorONE has licensed for distribution.

Click here to view the webinar (note the attachments tab where
full report is available for download).

DCIG will release more TOP 5 reports in the weeks and months
to come. Please sign up for the weekly DCIG Newsletter to
receive notice of their availability.

Parties interested in licensing DCIG blog articles as
executive white papers, please contact DCIG for more
information.

Four Cloud Backup Traps
More organizations than ever look to general purpose or public
cloud providers to host their applications and data. As they
do, they often identify and understand the type of cloud
service or service they plan to procure. They also need to go
one step further. They must also identify how to best back up
and recover the applications and data they host in the cloud
lest they fall into one of four common cloud backup traps.

IaaS versus SaaS
Organizations of all sizes embracing the cloud rarely comes as
a surprise to anyone. The 30 to 50+ percent year-over-year Q4
2020 growth in cloud revenue experienced by Amazon, Google,
and Microsoft confirms this trend.

These cloud providers primarily attribute this growth to
originating from two areas – infrastructure-as-a-service
(IaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS).

IaaS delivers cloud services such as compute services (virtual
machines), storage services (block, file, and object) and
database and networking services. Organizations then procure
and use these various services by deploying applications and
storing data on them.

Cloud-based SaaS offerings differ in that cloud providers host
applications in their cloud and charge organization for using
them. More well-known SaaS applications include Google
Workspace and Microsoft Office 365. The providers deliver,
maintain, and support the SaaS application. Organizations pay
to use and store data in them.

Four Cloud Backup Traps
In using one or both these IaaS and SaaS offerings,
organizations may assume these cloud providers do more than
they do. Including backup and recovery as part of their IaaS
or SaaS offering represents a trap into which organizations
may fall. This occurs for the following reasons:

1. Cloud providers do not automatically back up
and recover an organization’s data.
This premises hold true whether an organization uses a cloud
provider’s IaaS offering, its SaaS offering, or both.

Cloud providers do offer data protection. This may help
explain why organizations mistakenly assume cloud providers
offer backup and recovery. However, their data protection
offerings focus on high availability, redundancy, and
security, among others. They do not extend to include backup
and recovery.

2. Cloud providers offer backup services.
The availability of backup offerings from cloud providers may
contribute to the assumption they automatically back up and
recover data. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each offer backup

solutions, with Google having acquired one in December 2020.
However, organizations must separately procure these services,
set them up, and then manage backup and recovery. Cloud
providers do not perform any of these tasks for organizations.

3. Cloud provider backup solutions do not protect
data in their own SaaS offerings.
Organizations generally know the SaaS applications that cloud
providers offer. For instance, Microsoft offers Office 365 and
Google offers Workspace. Organizations may not know that
subscribing to and using Microsoft’s or Google’s respective
backup offering will not protect data in their SaaS offering.
Organizations will need to procure a separate, third-party
solution to perform this task for their Office 365 and
Workspace data.

4. Backup and recovery requirements differ between
IaaS and SaaS.
Obtaining a single solution that backs up and recovers both
IaaS and SaaS applications and data may still not suffice.
This stems from a subtle but important difference between IaaS
and SaaS backup requirements.

When backing up in IaaS, organizations often must back up and
recover both applications and data. When backing up in SaaS,
organizations only need to back up and recover the data. This
difference may seem minor. However, having no control over the
application, such as occurs with SaaS, influences how one may
perform recoveries of SaaS data. Backup solutions specifically
tuned to back up and recover SaaS applications better account
for this nuance.

Avoiding the Cloud Backup Traps
Organizations can avoid any of these common cloud backup traps
associated with deploying IaaS, SaaS, or both. The easiest

solution simply involves deploying a cloud backup solution
that targets a specific cloud provider’s IaaS or SaaS
offering.

If an organization uses both IaaS and SaaS offerings from a
cloud provider, they may need to deploy two separate cloud
backup solutions. Alternatively, they may deploy a single,
more comprehensive backup solution that protects both IaaS and
SaaS environments.

Keep Up-to-date with DCIG
DCIG announces the availability of new reports and webinars
via its newsletter. Announcements include links enabling
individuals to download the reports at no cost. To be notified
of new DCIG reports, sign up for the free weekly DCIG
Newsletter.

Technology providers interested in licensing DCIG blog
articles or sponsoring reports, please contact DCIG for more
information.

WekaFS—The Data Platform That
Breaks Through Storage Limits
This article, sponsored by WekaIO, evaluates the WekaFS high-
performance software-defined data platform based on DCIG’s
“Three New Rules for Selecting Scalable Storage Solutions.” In
short, WekaFS satisfies the most extreme storage requirements.
It combines sophisticated, yet simple to manage, storage with
a robust partnering strategy. This combination creates value
for end-user organizations through quicker time to market,
faster insights, and dramatic data center efficiency

improvements.

Many organizations need to generate, process, and store
multiple petabytes (PBs) of data. Increasingly they discover
that their legacy storage solutions lack the capacity and
performance required for workloads such as recommendation
engines, conversational AI, risk mitigation, financial
compliance, and other high-velocity analytics. Some of these
workloads involve millions of tiny files, while others process
individual files larger than twenty terabytes in size and
individual datasets in the hundreds of terabytes.

These demands put enterprises on notice to look for and obtain
scalable storage solutions that accomplish three objectives to
include:

     Easily and economically      grow      to   manage    multiple
     petabytes of data
     Meet changing application capacity and performance
     demands
     Dynamically detect and adapt to             changes    in   the
     environment with minimal intervention

Three New Rules for Addressing Scalable Storage
Objectives
To select a storage solution that scales to meet these
business and technical objectives, organizations should follow
these three rules:

   1. Select scalable storage solutions     that offer scale-out
      architectures
   2. Select scalable storage solutions      that offer both NAS
      and S3 object storage interfaces
   3. Select scalable storage solutions     that natively offer
      connectivity to third-party storage   clouds

Rule #1: Select scalable storage solutions that
offer scale-out architectures
WekaFS scalable storage is a modern file system designed on
day one as scale-out architecture with data structures
optimized for distributed grids and the parallelism of NVMe-
flash. Many file operations involve only metadata. By keeping
all metadata in NVMe flash and always writing new data to
NVMe-flash, Weka delivers latencies of just 200-300
microseconds, even as capacity scales to hundreds of
petabytes.

The Weka software runs in a Linux container on industry-
standard x86 server hardware. Nodes can run as dedicated
storage or as converged compute+storage infrastructure.
Clusters can start small yet scale to hundreds of nodes from
multiple server generations and multiple vendors. This
deployment flexibility enables organizations to dynamically
and independently scale cluster capacity and performance up or
down to meet extreme storage demands—economically.

Weka focuses more on partnering than competing, creating
complete pre-integrated high-performance solutions rather than
being yet another point solution that customers must somehow
integrate into their technology infrastructures. It even
partners with other storage vendors. The resulting solutions
are sold by key technology partners including Cisco, Dell,
HPE, Hitachi Vantara, Lenovo, Penguin Computing, Supermicro,
and specialty solution providers.

Weka’s record-breaking performance and robust partnering
strategy translate into real business value for Weka
customers. Their joint solutions enable end-user organizations
to achieve quicker time to market, faster insights, and
dramatic data center efficiency improvements.

Rule #2: Select scalable storage solutions that
offer both NAS and S3 object storage interfaces
Organizations must re-think how they store and access their
increasingly large data stores using a wider variety of
applications. They must select storage solutions based on
their capacity, performance, and the networked storage
protocols they support. Some legacy NAS providers are
responding by adding S3 object protocol support, and object
storage providers are adding NAS file protocol support.

WekaFS supports POSIX, NFS, SMB, and now NVIDIA® GPUDirect®
Storage (GDS) protocols. With Weka, data is fully sharable
between all the protocols—no tuning required. This extensive
protocol support eliminates storage silos and enables a single
copy of data to serve all users and applications.

WekaFS employs GPUDirect Storage (GDS) to deliver world-
record-shattering performance and maximize the amount of work
that NVIDIA-based systems can accomplish.

GDS provides the following technical benefits:

     Enables a direct path between GPU memory and storage.
     Increases the bandwidth, reduces the latency, and
     reduces the load on CPUs and GPUs for data transferal.
     Reduces the performance impact and dependence on CPUs to
     process storage data transfer.
     Performance force multiplier on top of the compute
     advantage for computational pipelines that are fully
     migrated to the GPU so that the GPU, rather than the
     CPU, has the first and last touch of data that moves
     between storage and the GPU.
     Supports interoperability with other OS-based file
     access, enabling data to be transferred to and from the
     device by using traditional file IO.

These technical benefits translate into real business value
for Weka customers. For example, Weka reduced one customer’s

pipelines from two weeks to four hours. Another Weka customer
had a genomics workload that was only 20% complete after 70
days of processing on legacy NAS. Weka completed the same
workload in just 7 days. Accelerating these workloads by 80x
and 50x delivered much better infrastructure efficiency and,
even more importantly, accelerated innovation through reduced
time to insight.

Rule #3: Select scalable storage solutions that
natively offer connectivity to third-party storage
clouds
Enterprises that store petabytes of data often have an
increasing need to store some or all this data off-site. They
may store it with these providers for archival, backup,
business continuity, compliance, bursting workloads to the
cloud, or distributing access to the data. Regardless of the
organization’s rationale, scalable storage solutions must
seamlessly store data with third-party cloud storage
providers.

WekaFS more than meets these requirements. It supported native
connectivity to S3 from day one. Its integrated tiering layer
automatically offloads cold data to any S3 object store or
cloud, applying user-defined policies on a per-filesystem
basis. But Weka does more than tier data to the cloud. Its
global namespace extends to data in these cloud object stores.
Thus, all the data remains available to all applications.

Organizations can run Weka in the cloud, but if an
organization uses the cloud only for backup and disaster
recovery, it is not necessary to keep a Weka instance running
continuously. Instead, customers can spin up a cloud cluster
as needed to receive snapshots and then spin the cluster down.
This flexibility can result in substantial dollar savings
compared to solutions that must run continuously in the cloud.

Beyond providing outstanding performance and integrating with

cloud storage, Weka offers a rich set of data services. These
enable Weka to integrate cleanly into existing enterprise
infrastructures, automation frameworks, and data protection
schemes.

The Rules Have Changed
Organizations needing to store a petabyte or more of data
should re-examine the storage systems they use. New scale-out
storage solutions have sufficiently matured to offer the ease
of deployment and management of scale-up storage systems.
These scale-out solutions also better address the long-
standing data migration and hardware refreshes associated with
scale-up storage.

More importantly, new scale-out storage solutions offer
additional features that organizations need to manage
petabytes of data. They support multiple networked storage
protocols, including S3, with the underlying technologies to
deliver high performance levels. Further, they recognize and
support the use of third-party storage clouds to meet other
business needs.

This combination of factors puts organizations on notice. When
it comes to supporting data stores of over a petabyte, the
rules for selecting scalable storage solutions have changed.

WekaFS scalable storage meets and exceeds even the most
extreme storage demands. Combining its high-performance scale-
out, multi-protocol, cloud-integrated file technology with a
robust partnering strategy, Weka has created a solution that
offers quick time-to-value through a network of trusted
enterprise technology providers.

Any organization grappling with multi-petabyte data management
challenges or seeking to create new value through data-
intensive processing would do well to examine the Weka
solution.

Keep Up-to-date with the Data Center Intelligence
Group (DCIG)
DCIG announces the availability of new reports and webinars
via its newsletter. Announcements include links enabling
individuals to download the reports at no cost. To be notified
of new DCIG reports, sign up for the free weekly DCIG
Newsletter.

Technology providers interested in licensing DCIG blog
articles or sponsoring reports, please contact DCIG for more
information.

2021-22 DCIG TOP 5 Office 365
Online SaaS Backup Solutions
Report Now Available
DCIG is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the
inaugural 2021-22 DCIG TOP 5 Office 365 Online SaaS Backup
Solutions report. This report unveils the TOP 5 software-as-a-
service (SaaS) backup solutions that organizations should
consider for protecting their data stored in Office 365
online.

Microsoft Office 365 Online Usage
Takes Off
Organizations may long remember 2020 as the year the COVID-19
pandemic dramatically changed the world forever as they knew

it. Due to stay-at-home requirements everywhere, staff from
more organizaÂtions worked remotely using online office
productivÂity software to collaborate and communicate. This
directly benefited Microsoft Office 365 Online.

During 2020 Microsoft Office 365 Online experiÂenced a
dramatic increase in usage. Consider:

     Microsoft Office 365 is the cloud software-as-a-service
     (SaaS) most used by enterprises
     Monthly active Office 365 users approached 230 million,
     a 15% YoY increase
     Teams had more than 115 million active users at the end
     of September 2020. This repreÂsented an increase of 40
     million users (more than 50%) from March 2020 and an
     increase of 100 million from April 2019

Your Data, Your Responsibility
As organizations increase their usage of Office 365, they may
overlook their need to back up data stored in it. Microsoft
only takes responsibility for the hardware and software it
uses to deliver and host Office 365 Online. It assumes limited
or no responsibility for the data organizations host in it.
Microsoft’s Services Agreement punctuates this point with
its disclaimer, “Your Content remains Your Content and you
are responsible for it.”

Backing up data organizations keep in Office 365 remains their
responsibility. To do so, many organiÂzations will look to a
cloud-based, SaaS backup solution to perform this task.

The State of Office 365 Online SaaS
Backup Solutions
Using Office 365 Online SaaS backup solutions hosted in the
cloud makes sense for organizations.As their usage of Office
365 scales up or down, these backup solutions adjust in kind.

Should organizations add more Office 365 users, they acquire
more backup licenses. Should their number of users decrease,
they may decrease their licenses as well.

Organizations will find the Office 365 Online SaaS backup
solutions listed here offer a baseline set of features. They
back up and recover the core Office 365 components
organizations most often use, such as Exchange, OneDrive, and
SharePoint. Teams, being a newer Office 365 offering,
typically has more limited support. However, over 50 percent
of solutions already offer some support for Microsoft Teams
with more robust options to protect Teams rapidly emerging.

All evaluated solutions deliver the foundational features that
organizations need to quickly begin protecting their Office
365 data. Consider:

Fast and Affordable
Most Office 365 SaaS backup services start at about US$4 per
user per month with an annual contract. Once an organization
subscribes and connects its Office 365 tenant to the SaaS
backup solution, backÂups often start automatically. Most
solutions, by default, schedule initial and recurring Office
365 backups without administrative intervention.

No Installation, Setup, or Maintenance
Providers host their Office 365 backup solution in either a
general-purpose or purpose-built cloud. The solution providers
then fix, patch, maintain, and update their software as part
of their SaaS backup offering.

Highly Available
Each SaaS backup solution aligns with Office 365 in an
important way: it gets hosted in a highly available cloud. The
cloud which hosts it does vary. Some host their software in
Microsoft Azure. Others use Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google
Cloud Platform (GCP), or a purpose-built cloud. Regardless of

the solution, each one includes a service level agreement
(SLA) of 99.5% or higher.

Backup Storage and Storage Costs Included
Many include cloud backup storage and its costs as part of the
subscription price. This cost includes managing the placement
of backup data in the cloud.

Free Trial Periods
Organizations may test a solution’s backup and recovery
capabilities without paying an upfront fee. Many offer some
type of trial for a limited time, usually 30 days. The trial
may include access to all features for some users; access to
some features for all users; or some combination thereof.

 Office 365 Online SaaS Backup
Solutions
In preparing this report, DCIG evaluated fifteen SaaS backup
solutions that protect Microsoft Office 365 Online. The
general categories under which the features evaluated for
these solutions fell included:

     Anti-ransomware capabilities
     Backup capabilities
     Recovery and restore capabilities
     SaaS configuration, licensing, and pricing
     Support

Based on these criteria, DCIG awarded the following enterprise
hybrid cloud SDS block storage solutions a TOP 5 ranking (in
alphabetical order):

     Metallic Office 365 Backup
     Spanning Backup for Office 365
     Spin Technology SpinOne for Office 365
     StorageCraft Cloud Backup for Office 365

Veritas Technologies SaaS Backup

Report Availability
The full 2021-22 DCIG TOP 5 report is available for download
immediately at this link available on a trusted third party’s
site The full report contains additional details such as:

     A listing of all fifteen solutions evaluated
     An overview of common features across all Office 365
     Online Saas Backup Solutions
     A deeper explanation on the similarities and differences
     between the TOP 5 solutions
     A profile of each solution that highlights the ways each
     one distinguishes itself from the other TOP 5 solutions

Confidentiality and Copyright
Other than excerpts from this report published in this
announcement, the contents of the 2021-22 DCIG TOP 5 Office
365 Online SaaS Backup Solutions report are copyrighted and
may not be republished without permission. Individuals may
access the full report at no cost by following this link to
Spanning’s website which has licensed this report.

DCIG continues to regularly release TOP 5 reports. Sign up for
the weekly DCIG Newsletter to receive notice of their
availability.